Jealousy 2 Poem by Mary Champion

Jealousy is heartfelt -
physically heartfelt -
an incessant ache that resists all reason.
Overwhelming -
it revokes restraint -
the ability to think
or act rationally.

Jealousy attacks like a rodent horde -
gnawing at your sanity,
with surgical incisions,
that cut the connections
between the synapses -
that carefully contrived network
which forms the cultivated veneer
that has protected you from barbarism.
for so long.

Jealousy festers, ferments,
fabricating toxic bubbles of resentment
that lighten your head,
only to fill it with dark designs of revenge.
The burning injustice ignites the slow fuse -
and as the predatory flame approaches the end of your tether -
blinded by the merciless agony -
you act …